Carol of the Bells

Four notes, repeated with small variations, carry the whole piece. Leontovych worked at his arrangement of the Ukrainian New Year chant Shchedryk over roughly two decades before the version first sung in Kyiv in December 1916; the English words that turned it into Carol of the Bells were written by Peter Wilhousky in 1936, and have nothing to do with the original text about a swallow foretelling a prosperous year.